Progressismo cultural - mau ou bom para o capitalismo?

How the Cultural Marxists Failed by Winning, por Gene Callahan, em The American Conservative:

William Lind described the origins of cultural Marxism as follows:

Following World War I, European Marxists faced a difficult question: why did the proletariat throughout Europe not rise in revolution and establish a new, Marxist order, as their ideology said it would? Two prominent Marxist thinkers, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukács in Hungary, came up with an answer: Western culture. Western culture so blinded the workers to their true, “class” interests that they could not act on them. (...)

This goal, of “saving” us by destroying the villain, Western civilization, was pursued through a multi-pronged attack. This was dubbed, by Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke, “the long march through the institutions.” Western civilization would be eradicated by gradually undermining the family, the local community, the church, the school, and perhaps most especially the university. (...)

By such means, the project of wrecking Western civilization has progressed pretty far. So why isn’t the proletariat casting off their chains and revolting? (...)

Asking a different question leads us to the answer, and that question is, “Why have corporations enthusiastically joined the cultural Marxists in their program of civilizational destruction?”

First off, do you know the old aphorism, “If you’re at a poker table and you don’t know who the mark is, you’re the mark”? If you answered, “Because corporations care about these issues,” well, you’re the mark. (...)

Those at the top of our giant corporations generally don’t care about these issues, at least not in any serious way: they care about becoming richer and richer and securing their positions against any potential threats.

The right answer as to why corporations have “joined” (“co-opted” is more like it) the cultural Marxists is that at some point, our corporate masters figured out that as the progress of wrecking Western culture progressed, people were becoming not revolutionary agents of change, but passive consumers of corporate swill and compliant workers penned in cubicles, nourished by fluorescent grow-lamps. (I am not claiming that corporate CEOs and boards are sophisticated social theorists who have explicitly traced this connection, just that at some point, they noticed, “Hey, this is working out pretty well for us!”) A key point in this learning process was likely when corporations found out that if they just offered “counter-cultural” rock stars enough money, those rock stars would happily would sell soda or credit cards. And such ads, offering packaged versions of sixties-era “individualism” and “rebellion,” were very effective at selling products, enabling marketing messages to slip right past the flower children’s wariness of big corporations.

Corporations found out that without a healthy culture, people are not natural Marxists but natural couch potatoes. With no extended family, no effective church, and no healthy local community to support their lives, people don’t form revolutionary cells: they buy a case of beer or renew their Xanax prescription and spend their non-working hours watching NFL games and the Lifetime network and various types of pornography. This dull, sedated existence is punctuated by certain “feast days,” such as Black Friday, when one can turn over lots of one’s money to corporations (...)

Por vezes há críticas do "progressismo cultural" cujo tom acaba por não ser tão diferente do que alguns dos próprios "progressistas culturais" diriam - esta conversa dos indivíduos atomizados que ficam dominados pelas grandes empresas e mergulhados no consumismo fica bem num site conservador social sem grande entusiasmo pelo capitalismo moderno; mas também não ficaria muito mal num panfleto radical por volta de 1970 criticando o estilo de vida pequeno-burguês (dizendo que é um falso individualismo que fomenta o conformismo) e fazendo a apologia de alguma espécie de comunidade alternativa (desde comunas rurais até à romantização dos bairros étnicos ou de enclaves boémios estilo Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury ou Quartier Latin) - mas isso talvez tenha a ver com o fenómeno referido neste texto que já devo ter linkado uma porção de vezes (diga-se que Gene Callahan votou em Jill Stein dos Verdes mas dizendo que se vivesse num estado que estivesse em disputa escolheria Donald Trump, o que me leva a suspeitar que ele próprio não estranhará a ideia de semelhanças entre pólos aparentemente opostos).

Já agora, em 1967, um ativista conservador fez um filme anti-hippie, The Hippies; acerca desse filme, Jesse Walker na Reason comentou "he blames the rise of the counterculture on the forces you'd probably expect a '60s conservative to invoke: progressive education, permissive parenting, World Communism. What makes his film interesting on more than a camp level is that he also blames big business, condemning consumerism and conformity in terms a hippie could love" (outro exemplo de conservadores culturais a usarem quase a mesma conversa que os progressistas?).